


Where You Can't Go

by romanticalgirl



Category: Brothers & Sisters
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-19
Updated: 2013-04-19
Packaged: 2017-12-08 22:13:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/766618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/romanticalgirl/pseuds/romanticalgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>under infidel skies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where You Can't Go

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [](http://inlovewithnight.livejournal.com/profile)[**inlovewithnight**](http://inlovewithnight.livejournal.com/) for the beta. Written for her [Songfic Flashfic Challenge](http://inlovewithnight.livejournal.com/1073106.html?view=8047826)
> 
> Originally posted 10-19-07

Nora watches him drive away, the dust rising from the ground like something out of a movie. The trees line the drive and the smell of oranges is in the air, hanging like a sweet undercurrent of sorrow.

She can hear the kids playing in the back of the house, voices raised in arguments and agreement, all talking at once. She recognizes their voices by their personalities, all of them fitting who she thinks her children are, who she suspects they’ll grow up to be. It’s not hard to see or know, all of them divided along lines drawn in the dust as easily as Tommy draws chalk lines in the grass out back before every game of flag football.

She leans against the doorframe and sighs, closing her eyes on the sight of him leaving. There are voices in her head, telling her one thing and then another, like the cartoon devil and angel sitting on her shoulders. She knows there’s a difference between the truth and what you want to believe, knows there’s an inherent danger in both. She’s just not sure which is more dangerous.

The truth, which he told her in quiet whispers when she confronted him - _Yes, we’re together._ , the lie - _It means nothing_ , or what falls between - _I’m breaking it off, it’s over. I don’t want to lose you._. The trick to it all is to cover the lie in the skin of the truth, or make everything around the lie sound so good it’s plausible, you have to believe it, you _want_ to believe it.

Nora knows that she’s a practical woman. She has five children to raise and she has no desire to do it on her own. She’s a good mother and a loving wife, and her husband is a liar. She catches lies like her children used to catch fireflies, locking them up in jars and forgetting to punch holes in the lids so they suffocate and die. She sees them every day in her children’s eyes, in their hesitations. Lies about homework and crushes, lies about speeding and money. She lives with little lies until they die their own death or she kills them, watching them struggle for their last breath.

He says he’s going to tell her - _Holly, Nora. Say the name._ \- that he’s leaving, that it has to end, that it can’t go on. She wants to believe that, and it’s the wanting that scares her. If she could need to believe it or have to believe it, it might be different, but she wants it, which means that he can lie to her if _he_ wants to. She believes it’s the truth though, that he’ll come back tonight a little quieter, a littler sadder. He’ll leave behind a piece of his life that he never should have had, give up the sweet taste of freedom he’s cheated fate and her to have.

The dust settles on the road and it’s almost as if he’s never left, or maybe that he was never here. But she still hears her children’s voices until she closes the door and moves back into the house. She craves freedom and escape as much as he does. More perhaps. He has a life outside of the family, a reason to get up in the morning. She doesn’t begrudge him that life, though she does feel sorry that he misses so much of what she sees as she watches their children grow, as she sees what they’ll all become. But they’ll have their lives and he’ll have his, and she has to wonder, when that happens, will all the dust of them moving on, of leaving settle around her as if she never existed at all.  



End file.
